At some point, there will be a limit to how fast a four-tire pit stop can be performed in a NASCAR Cup race. Humans can only run around a car so fast. Fuel can only flow so freely. Air guns can only loosen and tighten lug nuts so quickly.
But that limit? Teams haven’t reached it.
Some have performed seven-second pit stops in practice, leading to the question of how soon can they do that in a Cup race.
“I think you can get a seven-(second pit stop), low eights in a race, but there’s a trade-off to how risky you want to be,” said Allen Holman, jackman for Alex Bowman’s Hendrick Motorsports team.
The pursuit of speed on pit road comes with risk. With track position pivotal, fast pit stops can lead a team to a victory. But a mistake that slows a pit stop can cost a team a win.
That happened this past weekend 44 laps from the finish at Circuit of the Americas. On Christopher Bell’s first stop, fueler Peyton Moore didn’t grab the second fuel can cleanly from a crew member holding it behind pit wall.
That slowed Moore’s motion from unplugging the first can of gas from the car, exchanging it for a second can and then plugging that can into the car.
Once he connected the second can to the car, some fuel spilled, further slowing the stop, as former crew chief Todd Gordon and NASCAR on NBC analyst Steve Letarte explained in this video.
Those extra seconds put Bell further back in traffic. Even though he made only two pit stops, he couldn’t beat William Byron, who made three pit stops. Byron crossed the finish line 0.692 seconds ahead of Bell.
The fueler was once viewed as the position with the least amount of pressure — back when there were five lug nuts on wheels instead of one. It took longer to change four tires than fill the fuel cell in that era.
When the Cup Series moved to one lug nut on each wheel with the Next Gen car in 2022, all four tires could be changed before the car could be refilled with fuel. That meant the fueler had to connect the can to the car quickly because any delay would slow the pit stop.
“You don’t appreciate the speed (of a pit stop) until you are right there when they’re doing it,” Tyler Rader, gasman for Austin Dillon, told NBC Sports before the season.
Rader said he considers the fueler position as the “second hardest” position on a pit crew behind a jackman.
“There’s so little room for error,” he said.
Spencer Bishop, jackman for Byron’s team, said there are areas where crews can gain a few tenths of a second on pit stops.
He notes that as a jackman his goal is to jack the car just as it stops in the stall. The faster he can get the car jacked, the quicker the tire changers can begin their work.
Once he puts the right front tire on for the tire changer, Bishop said the goal is to have the car drop from the jack about two-tenths of a second after the slower of the two tire changers has taken their air gun off the lug nut. Such metrics are measured.
“You see sometimes where it’s less than two-tenths, but I think at that point, you’re guessing (on when to drop the jack),” said Bishop, who is in his seventh season as a jackman.
One key for Bishop during a stop is he can hear when to drop the jack instead of having to turn his head toward a tire changer — and waste time — to check for a confirmation.
“You do so many pit stops that you kind of get a cadence in your head of, ‘Alright, these lug nuts are coming off, this one is coming on,’” Bishop told NBC Sports.
“If I’m on the right side and I’m about to grab the right front, but I don’t hear the right rear coming off as I’m putting (the right front tire) on, I know, ‘OK, I’ve got to look at this. They might be behind a little bit.’
“And similar thing on the left. If I don’t hear a lug nut coming off on the left front (as he puts the left rear on), something’s up. There’s a different kind of pitch to the sound of the gun, too, like when it’s actually ratcheting as opposed to when it’s free spinning, it’s a little bit higher.”
Jacob Claborn is in his third season with Hendrick Motorsports and his first overseeing the organization’s pit crews. He came to Hendrick Motorsports after 16 years as a football coach, spending three seasons at the University of Wyoming
So how much faster can pit crews go?
“I don’t know where the limit is, to be honest,” Claborn said. “We talked about that going into the season — where we can still gain time? … A stop is going to go as fast as a jackman is going to go. So we recruit super quick and twitchy and dynamic jackmen because that’s where we believe that the stop is going to move towards as it goes.”
Twitchy athlete, what is that?
“We look for really powerful guys, guys that can move short distances very quickly,” Claborn said.
When they have pit crew combines to find new candidates, a key measuring device for jackmen, along with a bench press for strength and an agility test, is the vertical jump. Claborn says that test is important because “it shows that explosion through their feet, through their hips, all the way up.”
It’s all about finding ways to save a tenth of a second.
“It is definitely an interesting world of trying to chase such small times,” Claborn said.
2. Just like last year
Martin Truex Jr. is putting the disappointment of last year’s playoffs behind with a strong run to start this season.
Although he has yet to win a race or a stage, Truex leads the points heading into Sunday night’s race at Richmond Raceway (7 p.m. ET on Fox)
Since last season, no driver has scored more points, had more top 10s and led more laps in Cup regular season races than Truex.
Of course, that only makes the team’s woes in last year’s playoffs so vexing. The regular-season champion had seven finishes outside the top 15 in the playoffs after miscues, miscalculations and misfortune. Had he not accumulated so many points during the regular season, he could have been eliminated in the opening round. Instead, he made it to the Round of 8 before his title hopes ended.
In the 26 regular-season races last year and six this year, Truex has scored 1,104 points. Next is Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin at 1,042 points. William Byron has 1,003 points.
Truex has 19 top-10 finishes in those 32 regular-season races (59.4%) since last year. JGR teammate Christopher Bell is next with 17. Byron, Kyle Busch and Chris Buescher are next with 16 each.
Also, Truex has led 956 laps in those 32 regular-season races. Next is William Byron at 938, followed by Kyle Larson with 848 laps led.
“If we take (last year’s) playoffs out of the deal, we’ve been consistent and things have been going well for quite a while,” Truex said during a break in tire testing at Sonoma on Tuesday. “So the playoffs have been kind of a weird situation.
“I think for us, the good thing is we’ve had like top-five cars, top-five speed every single weekend (this season) at all these different tracks and that’s always a good sign.
“Guys are doing a good job. We’ve got to clean up some issues here and there, but, for the most part, we’ve got speed and that’s always the most important thing.”
3. A new experience
Bubba Pollard, one of the top pavement short track racers, will make his NASCAR debut in Saturday’s Xfinity Series race for JR Motorsports.
The 37-year-old Georgia native has won more than 100 Late Model races in his career, including the All American 400 at Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.
Kyle Busch calls Pollard “definitely one of the best from the South in the Super Late Model ranks.”
Bubba Pollard will make his #NASCAR Xfinity debut Saturday at Richmond. For all that he's done on the short tracks, what is he curious to experience Saturday? pic.twitter.com/rXCqcoDJkw
— Dustin Long (@dustinlong) March 27, 2024
Pollard admits to some nerves ahead of this weekend.
“I don’t want to let anyone down,” Pollard said. “There’s a lot of hype going on around this. I feel like as a racecar driver I can get it done. It’s just the odds are against us a little bit with not having much track time or just time in the car, but there are guys that have done it, like Josh (Berry), like Ryan Preece. Those guys have gotten the job done. So I got to go out there and do my job and compete and, hopefully, we have a good weekend.”
What is Pollard most curious about Saturday’s race?
“As far as the race goes, I’m curious about pit stops and how that’s going to go,” he said. “As far as the race … from what I’ve been told, it’s going to race a lot like what I’m accustomed to. I think the biggest struggle or the biggest hurdle I’m going to find this weekend is finding that little initial speed, as far as qualifying trim and things like that because we don’t really have anything to mock up on.
“ … As far as race runs, I think I’ll be fine. I think restarts and things like that, I may struggle kind of getting up to speed racing against some guys I don’t know, how far I can push the car and how far the tire will go.”
4. Sonoma testing
Martin Truex Jr., Ross Chastain and Josh Berry took part in a tire test this week on the repaved Sonoma Raceway.
The road course is fast.
Chastain said they were going more than two seconds faster than the track record Tuesday.
“That’s wild,” Chastain said of the speeds at the test. “We’re in different gears. We’re in second where you used to be in first. We’re in fifth where we used to be in fourth. Everything’s kind of up a gear and everything’s happening fast.”
Truex said the track has been “unbelievably fast. It feels like a different place. It feels even narrower than it used to feel because of the speed. It’s going to be totally different than ever … a lot faster, a lot more grip, really getting after it. I just don’t see how we’re going to be able to pass. It’s going to be follow the leader in my opinion, but we’ll see. Hopefully, I’m wrong.”
The Cup Series races at Sonoma on June 9.
5. No overtime
This is only the second time since 2004 — when the overtime rule was instituted in the middle of that season — that there has not been an overtime finish in the first six Cup races of the year.
Odds are that the streak continues this weekend at Richmond. The Virginia short track last had an overtime finish in Cup in April 2018.
Last July’s Cup race at Richmond had three cautions — tied for the fewest in the last 81 races at the track.
Going back to last season, the last nine Cup races have not had an overtime finish.
